


Textbook or Death

by bella2mytricx



Category: Carry On Series - Rainbow Rowell
Genre: Baz pov, He succeeds, M/M, baz's sole aim in life is to be a stuck up prick, due to the fact that he's hopelessly in love with him, get reading, he takes perverse pleasure in the suffering of simon snow, midnight revision sessions, stimulate that gay adrenaline
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-28
Updated: 2020-02-28
Packaged: 2021-02-27 22:07:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22943020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bella2mytricx/pseuds/bella2mytricx
Summary: Simon Snow attempting to study means one thing: Trouble.With an increasingly irate, on-the-brink-of-self-immolation Baz no longer willing to endure his incessant grunting and textbook thudding, he begrudgingly offers his help.Which he instantly regrets.
Relationships: Tyrannus Basilton "Baz" Pitch/Simon Snow
Comments: 2
Kudos: 70





	Textbook or Death

The evening gleam of sunset is now retiring beneath the willow trees, the serene mellow hews casted on my skin during football practice now submerged in the meanderings of a heedless breeze.

With a shudder, I step into Mummers. 

I proceed up the stairs, the nipping chill of the antiquated furnishings snaking the curve of my neck. I pray Snow hasn’t yet withdrawn to the room for the night, most predominantly because I look a monumental state right now, with my sweat-slicked hair and profusely damp gear clinging wretchedly to my figure. I’ll voluntarily condemn myself to the merwolves if his eyes set on me.

Of course I’m not so lucky.

My eye immediately catches him as I bolt open the door, perched at his desk, head dug deep in books.

“Crowley, Snow, you’re actually studying?” I snide, “I’m not in the midst of an abominable acid trip and this isn’t just the devastatingly unfortunate destination?” attempting to obstruct my vocals from betraying their true forbearance- the fact they’re aching to drip with utter admiration at the sight of the soft dishevelled curls currently sporting the crown of his head. (No doubt the result of him unmercifully raking his butter-greased fingers through.) (The animal.)

Snow glances up but freezes mid-scowl, his jaw dropping open, and oh Merlin help me, I’m _sure_ I didn’t just imagine the way his gaze flitted the length of my body.

I suddenly feel immensely exposed in my air-knit polyester football kit.

I swallow.

He blinks, _once, twice,_ and then his face is re-contorting into a glare. “Oh bugger off,” he growls into his binders, gifting me with a moment to regain my trembling breath and plod to my bed.

A tormented moan and plummeting textbook girdles my ears as I shove off my boots. _Studying going decidedly south, then._

I had managed to pack a couple of hours in at the library before training. It was primarily just to replenish today’s lesson material, skimming over supplementary notes and whatnot. (All homework and auxiliary revision already completed, of course). I’ll be damned if I allow Bunce to steal beyond me in our ever-long ravage for top of the class, and admittedly we are currently fairly level in that regard, though I’d never in my wildest dreams let on.

“Oh please,” I laugh. “Don’t take your petty grievances out on me just because you neglect to grasp the fact that your beloved chav slang is no way to utter the words of Shakespeare’s exquisite text, and consequentially the reason you fail to perform even a moderately sufficient spell.”

I do feel a twinge of guilt at that blow. Today in class Snow had attempted casting ‘ **Nothing will come of nothing!** ’, but rather his disastrous accent unceremoniously pronounced it as “nufin” and sent twanged fizzles of smoke throughout the room. I had glimpsed over as he bolted his swimming eyes wearily on Bunce, to which she threw him an appeasing smile with a downward cast of her lip. “Don’t worry, Si. Next time,” she winked as she stroked his arm. It was an exceedingly endearing moment, and I was forced to endure the beginnings of my tear ducts dampening as a demented result. Crowley, I’m pathetic.

Snow sighs exasperatedly. “You’re not _still_ going on about that? I _told_ you- it’s not my fault the bloke wrote like an Elizabethanised scarily intensified version of you, _and_ as though he had a thousand more sticks up his arse.”

I glare at him. “Insult William like that again and I’ll skin you alive,” I deadpan.

“Whatever.”

He refocuses his attention on his scattered books, piercing his eyes through them like bloody lasers.

“Hoping they’ll combust into thin air?” I chide. “Merlin, Snow, you may be the Chosen One, but I doubt even you could whip up a spot of recreational disintegration.”

He dismisses my taunt with a wave of his hand to pursue his apparent ‘Implement Eyeballs to Burrow Gorge into 16th Century Magical Words Volume’ endeavour.

I’d be bearing a disgraceful state of pretence if I argued that his current studious attentiveness didn’t drive an unlawful shiver throughout my veins, explicitly with the way he’s now clenching his jaw and jutting that outrageous chin out. Merlin help me, I want to punch it. Or lick it.

I abruptly plunge down on my sadistic fantasies and tread to the en suite with a fresh pair of pyjamas and towel in hand, thrilled to finally tranquilise my expended bones beneath the lulling cascade of the shower.

I’m all too aware of Snow’s eyes on me as I seal the door. 

+++

A blanket of hazy twilight glimmers the polished oaked furnishings, inking muted shadows off of the matte-creamed walls. 

I’m snuggled in bed, swarming myself in the soft embroidered quilts as I engage in a spot of light reading ( _Wuthering Heights_ , a tremendous classic), though it’s proving difficult to endow it much regard. 

That is, because my alerts are much more pivoted on Snow, who’s been splayed gloriously across his bed with his legs thrown to the wall ever since I emerged from the bathroom. He stiffened when I re-entered. He always does when I surface from a shower; his gaze blazing through me as I towel my hair. I don’t know why. Perhaps he surmises that I’ve had a grand forty-seven minutes plotting his optimum downfall with suds and Mr Ducky. 

His head is dangling upside down off the side of the bed, his arms outstretched as he clasps a Political Science textbook above himself, and every now and again I’m bestowed with a ravishing disgruntled groan as it slips and slams his face. It’s supremely endearing. 

Another wail.

My eyes betray me as they persistently drift across and observe his latest book-induced fatality. He’s now hunched cross-legged, massaging a finger over the arch of his nose.

He catches me staring and I raise an eyebrow.

“Shut up,” he grunts. 

I smirk. “Did I say anything?”

He moans and flops on his back. “I hate studying.” 

“Nonsense,” I taunt. “It’s the best part of school.”

“Sorry, we didn’t all exactly pop out of the womb as mini Einsteins quoting the Brontë sisters.”

I sigh and fold my novel, the Yorkshire Moors no longer sustaining my interests tonight. Not even the gorgeously Byronic Heathcliff can outweigh Snow. 

He grumbles and we lapse into silence. 

And then, because I’m weak and a constant disappointment to myself: “Would you like help?”

Snow’s eyes instantly shoot to me. His brow is furrowed and his jaw is hanging open as though I’ve just professed to be bloody Merlin himself. “Why?” he asks, dumbfounded. 

I’m not sure what impelled me to say it. Perhaps it was the sweat trickling his forehead, causing his swarm of curls to plaster into an irresistible fringe-like catastrophe. Or the way each one of his dejected sighs increasingly reverberated through me, forcing all of my willpower not to storm right over there and bloody _kiss_ him to shut him up.

I do feel myself blush a bit. Perhaps my proposal was too far. We’re not exactly at any stage of cosy midnight revision sessions followed by hot chocolates and hair braiding. But I’ve bleeding uttered it now, so I have to trudge on with it. I won’t back down. I’m a Pitch.

“Because, Snow, I can no longer stand to be subject to your incessant huffing and cumbersomely thudding books when I’m seeking to relish in the slightest morsel of peace,” I bite, splaying my arms frantically. “Not to mention the fact that your blasted smoke would give my ancestral wood burning fire a chuffing good run for its money.”

He’s silent as I realign my eye on him.

Oh. 

He’s gaping at me, his eyes wide. Perhaps I should refrain from divulging in sporadically deranged outbursts when on the defensive, in future. 

But then he clears his throat. “Um, I suppose... yeah. That would be… good. Thanks…” 

I exhale, tearing back my covers and shifting to the bed’s edge, my bare feet dangling to the carpet. “Right.”

“Right,” he echoes. 

But neither of us dares to move.

“Well come over here then,” I scowl, although not distinctly sure how I’m about to navigate this. Will we be sitting next each other? Crowley, will we be sitting next each other _on my bed?_ My heart rate escalates multiple octaves. 

And now he’s standing before me with his blasted, divine, mole-riddled neck, and-

Yes. 

I immediately know I’m done for.

I’m going to burst into flames. I’m going to plummet head first down the mouth of a merwolf. I’m going to-

“Baz?” 

I blink. “What?”

“So can I?” 

I must have dazed out. “Can you wha-” I start, until I register how he’s – hesitantly – beckoning his hand in the general proximity next to me. 

Ah. So we _are_ going to sit beside each other. Cramped. On my bed. That’s fine. That’s _fine_.

“Yes,” I grind out. 

But to my immense horror, as he plonks down, I shamefully bound up and unleash a piercing yelp. I act on instinct, and it’s only now that I’m flailing on my feet that I perceive just what I’ve done. 

Great Snakes, who permitted me to be so heinously pathetic? I’m a bleeding national threat. 

And now Snow is staring up at me, absolute bemusement etched in his brow. “Uh,” I stutter. I never stutter. “Water. Yes. I need water.”

This serves for a raise of his eyebrows as I abashedly fetch my bottle from my desk, conjecturing that death via mortification must truly be a theory and one which I am currently the subject of. 

Crowley, how on earth am I going to get through this? 

I sink into the duvet as I re-position myself beside him, parted by mere inches. The humming lamp on the bedside casts a lilting electric glow, enveloping us in a dulcet of seclusion. 

His faint breath throngs the air as he fidgets with the textbook splayed in his lap, briskly jigging his foot. 

“Snow, are you trying to batter a hole through the flooring?” I snap. “Fancy plunging in to our neighbours down below for a quick cuppa, do you?” 

“Oh. Uh, sorry,” he mumbles. His foot stops bouncing. 

Dear Merlin, his presence is overbearing. 

“So,” I begin. “Which exact part of your studies is causing you so much grief that I haven’t caught an inch of solitude since I stepped through the door?”

(I _haven’t_ caught an inch of solitude, but not for that reason.) (His moles and curls may be more to blame.)

“Well,” he stumbles, grappling at the book slipping from his knee. “I think it’s more like, uh, the technique, of learning it. Like, I’m not sure of the best way to, um, get it in my head. Kind of.” 

“And you thought having a pop at the nocturnal life of bat was the best way to solve such predicament?” 

He scowls. 

I sigh. “Ok, which subject are you currently on?”

“Greek."

“Right, and how far are you into your revision?”

His face falls.

“Oh bloody Merlin,” I exasperate. “Are you telling me that in the whole century you’ve been flung across that bed this evening, you’ve made neither head nor tail of that blinking textbook?” 

I wasn’t exactly immersed in my reading either, but at least I have an excuse. (Him.) 

“Well don’t blame it on me; you’re the one who had a shower,” he announces.

That throws me. I glare at him to continue. 

He stumbles to explain. “Like,” he flounders. “It’s hard to study, when you come out and, uh, your shampoo fills the room. It’s all lemony and citrusy and like… you’ve been buried in a barrel of apples… or, something.” 

I quirk an eyebrow. “Buried in a barrel of apples…?” 

“Ugh, you know what I mean.”

“Pray tell, Snow, I really don’t.” 

“I just mean, you make it hard to concentrate,” he blurts. 

Well.

 _That_ takes me by surprise. 

His eyes explode and his mouth drops. “No, no!” he blunders. “Not you. _Not_ you. Your hair. No, not your hair! Your shampoo. Yes, your shampoo. Makes it hard to, uh, concentrate,” he concludes with a flustered jolt of his head.

Ok.

What the fuck? 

His muddled ramblings have captured us in an uneasy air of disconcertment, only the steady thrum of the air conditioner rumbling the void. 

Snow looks as though he’s on the verge of mental collapse, if his relentless smoke and hair tearing is anything to go off of.

His words scurried out like a stampede of worsegers, and I find myself coiling through them to unravel their core. 

He blustered about my shampoo a lot. And my hair. Smelling of fruit and as though I embed myself in a pit of exotic extracts every time I hop in the shower. (Merlin only knows where this boy acquired such an array of analogies.) 

But I think, maybe, most predominantly was:

_You make it hard to concentrate._

What does _that_ mean? I make it hard to concentrate? How? _Why?_

My only fathom is that he’s ceaselessly on edge in my presence, deeming that I’ll perhaps spear his neck as he ties his laces. Or maybe that I’m plotting under my sheets, conducting the recipe for his stellar death from a nineteenth century Victorian literature.

Although, for a moment, I did think- 

_You make it hard to concentrate._

No. 

There’s no point going there. 

It’s just that, sometimes, even tonight (Merlin, _especially_ tonight), I felt his gaze burning into me from across the room, smouldering me to my spot. And when I dared to glance over, he furtively averted his eyes, kindling a ghosting chill in my spine. 

I never know what it means. 

I’m surfaced from my – bewildered – thoughts to a confounded Snow, who’s staring at me in wonder. “ _Baz_ ,” he declares, loud, and there’s the chase of a smile at his mouth. (It’s beautiful.)

I clear my throat. “Yes?” 

“I was calling you for ages. Thought you were gone with the fairies, then,” and his smile grows wider. “Or that the merwolves had finally discovered mind-invading powers and had commissioned you as their first target.” 

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I scowl. “And, ‘ _commissioned_ ’, Snow, really? How in Merlin’s name do you know such a word?” 

“Well, I read it in the textbook there now,” he confesses with a guilty smile.

Crowley, if he keeps smiling at me like this, I’ll bloody fetch the merwolves to devour my mind, myself.

+++

“Snow, for the last time, how can this concept possibly be so difficult for you to grasp?”

“I think you’re just a bad teacher,” he sulks. 

“I beg your pardon?” I snap. “My mother was headmistress, and such genetics have therefore indisputably passed down to me.”

We’ve relocated to the floor. That is, after Snow complained that my mattress was, in his precise words, “ _digging into my bloody arse_ ”. I pointed out that our mattresses are quite literally symmetrical, along with every bleeding other one in the whole of Mummers House. He came to the conclusion that I must have carving knives stashed beneath my sheets.

Anyway, I was all too willing to oblige to his flooring proposition, because it was all _kinds_ of weird having Simon Snow on my actual _bed_. It felt absurd. Unnatural. 

And maybe, a little too hopeful. 

He’s sprawled opposite me; his back slumped against the bed, swamped in his disastrously dispersed jotters. The crescent moon flickers through the glazed window, glinting veiled sparkles upon the tips of his golden brown locks.

“I don’t think ‘headmistress’ exactly qualifies as a genetic,” he retorts. 

“You’re being obstinate.” 

“Ugh, what does that even mean?” he imparts with a weak scowl, as he plucks at a thread he’s just now detected in his bottoms. 

“It means stubbornly refusing to change one’s opinion or chosen course of action, despite attempts to persuade one to do so.”

He glares at me. “I swear you just quoted the Oxford Dictionary. Do you just revise that thing as a hobby or something?” He sighs and lounges his legs, causing his back to slouch further to the floor.

Our beds are so close, the gap is so small, and our feet, they almost overlap; almost touch. They did, once, but I swiftly lurched away. Which is why I’m now excruciatingly positioned with my knees arched, hugged tight to my chest, out of reach. But even so, it would only take the tiniest bump forward to connect with the tips of Snow’s toes. And oh, how I _want_ to. 

It makes for increasingly difficult concentration.

“Hush,” I snarl. “Back to the task at hand. I’m attempting to teach you alternative study techniques. Thus far, the only thing you have “studied” is the bleeding Minotaur’s love life.”

Despite living with him for the guts of a decade, I have never quite been acquainted with Snow’s shocking chattering capabilities. I suppose we never actually talk. Or rather, he would attempt to, and I would abruptly shut him down. I can’t bear to be in his god-forsaken, spellbinding presence, let alone bloody converse with him. 

Frankly, it’ll be a sodding miracle if I survive tonight. 

“All I’m saying,” he goes on, “is that I hope the poor bloke finds someone soon.”

“And how would you know that he hasn’t?” I ask. (That’s another thing; I’ve found myself flaming _indulging_ his ridiculous prattle.) 

“Well, I just kind of assumed,” he shrugs.

“What, because he doesn’t have a sign bolting his chest etched with “Simon Snow, I’m taken!” all of a sudden he’s inherently single?”

Snow’s eyes amplify, ten-fold. “Aha! You said my name!” 

I huff, glowering at him. “Is that all you took from that? And anyway, I had said it in speech marks, so it doesn’t count. It was the Minotaur speaking, technically.” 

“Now who’s being obstinate?” He shoots me a grin as wide as the bloody Cheshire Cat. 

I want to punch him. 

Or kiss him.

Bloody Merlin, I’m not escaping this alive. 

+++

**Author's Note:**

> i have. returned. 
> 
> godbless for reading and check out my other work bc funding for gay college don’t come cheap. 
> 
> also, someone bang these two idiots' heads together. i ain't doing it.


End file.
